Concert at Clemens Center in Elmira on Friday

The 1920s didn’t roar merely because of the high-flying prosperity after the Great War or the many booze-fueled parties that poked a finger in the eye of Prohibition.

Flapper girls and their fellas loved to cut a rug to the energetic and exciting new sounds of jazz from Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller. That buoyant spirit later helped to carry Americans through the darkest days of the Great Depression and World War II.

Today, music lovers have rediscovered the joys of vintage jazz, and a strong cadre of musicians is looking back 90 years for songs both popular and obscure as well as creating new tunes inspired by the greats who came before them.

One band invoking the humor and heart of the era — especially from New York City, New Orleans and Paris — is the Hot Sardines, a NYC-based collective led by the stride-piano talents of bandleader Evan "Bibs" Palazzo, the classically playful vocals of lead singer "Miz Elizabeth" Bougerol and tap-dancer Edwin "Fast Eddy" Francisco.

The Hot Sardines will perform Friday night at the Clemens Center in Elmira, hoping to draw the same mix of 20-something hipsters, older jazz fans and everyone in between that they have attracted around the U.S. and Europe.

“We are so fortunate to get started in New York in a scene where we were able to put this music in front of people who might have heard recordings of old jazz, but when you hear it live, it’s a completely different experience,” Palazzo said in a recent interview.

“We are happy to have the generations that knew this music from the 20th century while they were in their youth. But what’s most encouraging is to see people who are exposed to it for the first time — they catch it in a way that doesn’t have the baggage of history attached to it, like it’s some kind of research project. They take it on its own terms, as if it’s music that was written today.”

Funny thing is, Palazzo and Bougerol never really planned to have full-time careers in music. She’s a native of Paris who earned a degree in media and communications from the London School of Economics and spent many years as a travel writer, never singing a note outside her morning shower. He’s a native of the Big Apple who started playing piano by ear at age 3 and studied theater and musical theater at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

They met 10 years ago when Bougerol and Palazzo answered the same Craigslist ad for a traditional jazz jam session in midtown Manhattan, and an instant musical connection was forged. Francisco joined later, almost by accident when he stopped by Palazzo’s apartment on an errand for a friend. The band’s rhythm section became Bougerol on washboard and Francisco tapping his flourishes.

“That came from the energy of the music and our love of Fred Astaire both as a dancer and a musician and one of the great vocalists, as well as Gene Kelly,” Palazzo said. “Loving tap-dancing was a big part, but it’s also a visual depiction of the energy of the music, and for our live shows it really helps first-time listeners who haven’t heard this music live. That helps them relate quickly to the kind of vibe we’re trying to create. Of course, our tap-dancer is quite talented and able to improvise, which always helps.”

Emerging from those jams, the Hot Sardines started adding a horn section and playing throughout NYC’s speakeasy scene, performing at smaller venues and free shows for friends. That changed in 2011, when a booker for a Bastille Day concert needed a last-minute replacement for a band that dropped out — since Bougerol sings in English and French, it made perfect sense.

The Hot Sardines, fresh from the release of their album “French Fries and Champagne,” perform Friday at the Clemens Center in Elmira.(Photo: Provided)

The gig turned out to be part of the Midsummer Night’s Swing at Lincoln Center, in front of more than 6,000 people, and they blew the lid off the place. That’s when the high-profile offers started coming in.

“Like all great things in life, it happened out of our love of the music and trying to — on the side, as a hobby — get together and maybe do an open mic with a pianist and a vocalist or write some tunes just for fun,” Palazzo said. “But we found ourselves in New York at a time when traditional jazz was a big thing coming up out of the conservatories.”

After releasing a self-titled album on Universal in 2014 (which went to No. 1 on the iTunes Jazz charts in the U.S. and U.K.), the group’s second disc “French Fries and Champagne” came out last June. As the title implies, the tunes range from rollicking “hot jazz” to more elegant ballads about newfound love, loss and loneliness that feature lush orchestral arrangements.

Among the highlights are the title track (a fun ditty that imagines a party that blots out recent heartbreak), a cover of Ella Fitzgerald’s “When I Get Low, I Get High” (a duet with actor Alan Cumming, a Hot Sardines fan) and a sultry big-band version of Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love.”

Conventional wisdom says that a band’s sophomore album can be the most difficult, but Palazzo believes that the positive reaction they’ve received from an ever-growing fanbase gave the Hot Sardines the courage to stretch out a little further on “French Fries and Champagne.”

“The first album was more like, ‘Oh my God, we get to record for a major label! Look at us!’” Palazzo said with a laugh. “I’m proud of the first album, and it’s very representational of what we were doing in our live show.

“This album, we had the time and space to come up with this whole idea of high and now, which French fries and champagne sort of signifies, and to get the pinky into the genres of music spanning the first half of the last century, as opposed to jazz as just a replication of 1920s flapper or New Orleans thing.”

One disadvantage of new-found fame has been less time to work on new material. Comparing five years ago to today, Palazzo said, “now we’re moving at a hundred miles an hour and changing the tires on the bus as we move down the highway.”

However, in addition to all the fun they have playing together onstage and off, the band remains serious about the music — and that means finding time for inspiration when they can.

“At some point, something germinates,” Palazzo said. “It can be something as simple as our bass player doing something and we say, ‘What was that?’ Or ‘I just heard a great version of an Ella Fitzgerald song where the arrangement goes like this or that.’ Or it could be a riff or tune going on inside one of our heads.”

While the Hot Sardines carry the torch of traditional jazz in the 21st century, band members always hope that their music encourages listeners to look back to those pioneers of the 20th century and find where the influences lie.

“If we could contribute to that in the smallest way, our work is done,” Palazzo said. “There’s a lot there that’s very relevant to what we’re grappling with today.”